The invention relates in general to ballistic munitions and in particular to ballistic projectiles that measure conditions in the launching tube.
Military organizations have always needed a device to obtain information about the interior ballistic environment of cannon launching projectiles. Knowledge of launching conditions is used to design cannons and munitions to achieve optimum launching and accuracy. Only within the past 50 years have scientists started placing sensors into projectiles to record the interior ballistic event. Early electronic devices were pressure sensors that were hard-wired to a data acquisition system located near the cannon. When the projectile was launched, the data acquisition system would record several milliseconds of data before the wire was broken.
More recently, commercially available electronics have allowed the instrumentation of projectiles with small accelerometer sensors and pressure gages. These devices either recorded or telemetered data at a relatively low frequency rate, thus missing phenomena or smoothing out the data. Additionally, these older devices were one-time shot devices that were destroyed during the test.